oly Preaching." In 1215 the bishop of
Toulouse, Dominic's great friend, established them in a church and house
of the city, and Dominic went to Rome to obtain the permission of
Innocent III. to found his order of preachers. The course of events is
traced in the article DOMINICANS. After three years, in 1218, the full
permission he desired was given by Honorius III. These last years of his
life were spent in journeying backwards and forwards between Toulouse
and Rome, where his abode was at the basilica of Santa Sabina on the
Aventine, given to him by the pope; and then in extended journeys all
over Italy, and to Paris, and into Spain, establishing friaries and
organizing the order wherever he went. It propagated and spread with
extraordinary rapidity, so that by Dominic's death in 1221, only five or
six years after the first practical steps towards the execution of the
idea, there were over 500 friars and 60 friaries, divided into 8
provinces embracing the whole of western Europe. Thus Dominic was at his
death able to contemplate his great creation solidly established, and
well launched on its career to preach to the whole world.

It appears that at the end of his life Dominic had the idea of going
himself to preach to the heathen Kuman Tatars on the Dnieper and the
Volga. But this was not to be; he was worn out by the incessant toils
and fatigues and austerities of his laborious life, and he died at his
monastery at Bologna, on the 6th of August 1221. He was canonized in
1234 by Gregory IX., who, as Cardinal Ugolino, had been the great friend
and supporter both of Dominic and of Francis of Assisi. As St Dominic's
character and work do not receive the same general recognition as do St
Francis of Assisi's, it will be worth while to quote from the
appreciation by Prof. Grutzmacher of Heidelberg:--"It is certain that
Dominic was a noble personality of genuine and true piety.... Only by
the preaching of pure doctrine would he overcome heretics.... He was by
nature soft-hearted, so that he often shed tears through warm
sympathy.... In the purity of his intention and the earnestness with
which he strove to carry out his ideal, he was not inferior to Francis."

The chief sources for St Dominic's life are the account by Jordan of
Saxony, his successor as master-general of the order, and the evidence
of the witnesses at the Process of Canonization,--all in the
Bollandists' _Acta sanctorum_, Aug. 4. Probably the best mode